Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been

From the makers of the critically and commercially successful Don't Starve, Oxygen Not Included is arguably the best base management game. I've never been into base building and management games but this one is great.

Fallout Shelter's problem seems to have been that it was only aimed at generating buzz for the upcoming Fallout 4. It was shallow. ONI has much more depth in its gameplay mechanics. At higher levels, you even have to do some visual scripting in a way that's reminiscent of SpaceChem. Don't worry though, it's accessible even to someone like me who has little to no programming experience. It's one of those games where you enjoy even failures because you learn from them and imagine how you'll do better next time, much like KSP.

Like Kerbal Space Program, it can be daunting at first but it's quite rewarding. I'm 10 hours in and I'm only starting to get my footing. In KSP terms, I'm starting to make it to orbit and yet the game has so much more ahead. It hooks you with pretty graphics and animation but there's a lot of substance behind those cute looks.
1

Oxygen Not Included is amazing. I couldn't agree more more that it is one of the best base management games out there. The game is so good, it is hard to believe it is still in Early Access. There are AAA games that cannot shine a candle to the level of quality that ONI has at this point in time. One of the things I really like is that the danger comes mainly from the environment. There's no space aliens with laser blasters attacking your base. It is all about managing gases, resources, heat, etc. This is a rarity in base builders and is very welcome. I like too that every disadvantage can be turned to your advantage in some way. Chlorine gas is unbreathable, but it kills germs dead. It is all about how you use it.
2

Yes, one of the ways in which ONI has depth is in how you can use multiple drawbacks to gain a benefit. I started this thread partly because I recently took a chance on it and was surprised by how good it was and partly because I figured we could help each other out to get started, much like we did with KSP. It's the kind of unassuming game that really hits it right.

As you mention, it's a head above what big studios have been able to do. It is to AAA base building games what Cities: Skylines was to SimCity 2013; 10 times fewer resources behind it but 10 times better. This is one of those games where you don't have to be afraid of getting ripped off if you buy it in early access. It's amply worth the price in its current form and will only improve with time. You're getting a deal.
3

I got it about a week ago on sale, and am completely obsessed with it. This, my seventh or eighth colony, has made it into the triple-digit days (almost entirely because I stopped accepting every dupe /worker that was offered to me). When I leave the game and go turn on the dehumidifier in my house, I find myself wondering whether I should build a pipe to pump the wastewater to my cistern where my recycler unit will clean it and return it to my reservoir....
7

Is it kid-friendly at all? I could see a game like this inspiring a generation of engineers.

Adorably cartoonish graphics, next to no violence (I'm about 20 hours in and the closest I've come to violence is killing a tiny crab-monster for meat). But it's got a pretty steep learning curve. I don't normally watch videos to figure out how to play a game.

Is it kid-friendly at all? I could see a game like this inspiring a generation of engineers.

It's quite kid-friendly. Your toons can die and it can involve catch, ranching and eating animals but it's very light in terms of violence. It's about the level of Minecraft or Super Mario.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Left Hand of Dorkness

I got it about a week ago on sale, and am completely obsessed with it. This, my seventh or eighth colony, has made it into the triple-digit days (almost entirely because I stopped accepting every dupe /worker that was offered to me).

It's one of those games where you're eager to learn from failures and apply the lessons to your next attempt. That's a big reason it made it think of KSP.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Left Hand of Dorkness

Adorably cartoonish graphics, next to no violence (I'm about 20 hours in and the closest I've come to violence is killing a tiny crab-monster for meat). But it's got a pretty steep learning curve. I don't normally watch videos to figure out how to play a game.

I'm watching videos.

Yes, it's deep, you should see your first 10 games as introductions, learning opportunities.

If you have questions, perhaps others here can answer them. If you found out something neat, you could also mention it here.
10

Well, a couple hours of playtime, and I can see myself getting hooked on this.

I do have a couple questions:

1) I set up a row of algae terrariums to produce oxygen. Eventually, they were entirely encased in polluted oxygen, and when I moused over to see what the little red box was saying, it said they were out of algae. Does it die off and I have to find more? Or did my algae burner (or whatever that first thing is) use up all the algae out of my terrariums?

2) I built a group of planters, planted meal plants, and set up the mush maker to use the meal lice to make healthy, delicious bars of muck. Instead of ever getting used for muck, my idiotsduplicants just ate the damn seeds. Is there a way to prevent that?

I'm two colonies in, and neither has survived to see Day 20. This is giving me minor flashbacks to Dwarf Fortress, but with prettier mooks.
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1) I set up a row of algae terrariums to produce oxygen. Eventually, they were entirely encased in polluted oxygen, and when I moused over to see what the little red box was saying, it said they were out of algae. Does it die off and I have to find more? Or did my algae burner (or whatever that first thing is) use up all the algae out of my terrariums?

Almost every bit of machinery produces an unpleasant output. In the case of your algae terrariums, they make polluted water. If you look in front of the terrarium, you'll see a bottle of greenish water--that's the polluted water. Polluted water emits polluted oxygen.

Here's what you'll want to do:
1) Somewhere that's somewhat removed from your main action, dig a deep hole--like, maybe 6 tiles deep by 4 tiles wide. You'll need a ladder going down into it so you can get out.
2) From the plumbing menu, build a bottle emptier that'll empty into the hole. (You can hit "O" to flip the emptier's orientation when you build it).

Once that's done, your dupes--the little dudes in your base--will automatically empty the bottles into the cistern you dug.

Eventually you'll research deodorizers, which turn polluted oxygen into clean oxygen; you can put some around your cistern to cut down on the polluted oxygen.

Also, if the algae terrariums are out of algae, you gotta go dig up more algae.

2) I built a group of planters, planted meal plants, and set up the mush maker to use the meal lice to make healthy, delicious bars of muck. Instead of ever getting used for muck, my idiotsduplicants just ate the damn seeds. Is there a way to prevent that?[/QUOTE]
Muck is made from dirt and water. You'll need to choose "liceloaf" if you want them to cook the meal lice. But they won't eat the seeds for planting new meal lice--they'll just eat the product of the plant, so you don't need to worry about that.
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For your first 20 cycles, 4 dupes is probably enough. After that, adding a new dupe every 10-20 cycles seems about right: I'm at cycle 120 or so, and have 10 dupes now. You want to be really selective. If you can find a dupe with a +5 skill that's helpful to you, AND has diver's lungs (so they'll use minimal oxygen), that's one worth taking.
13

A couple of other tips:
-Build a central ladder in your base, and try to expand to the left and right of the ladder. The dupes look like they move fast, but they can waste a lot of time moving around instead of doing something useful. Minimizing their travel time really adds up.
-Leave a tile of empty space to the left and right of your central ladder. You really need gases to be able to move freely throughout your base (at least by default--later on you'll want to control them), and having a wide air column in the middle will make that much easier.
-Build algae terrariums at the bottom of the base, where carbon dioxide will settle. It'll prevent CO2 buildup.
-Build algae deoxidizers along the central air shaft, where they can do the most good--since gas moves most freely there, air pressure will build up less.
-Check out the priorities menu when you get a chance: it'll let you tell dupes to prioritize the tasks they're good at.
-When you get the jobs board (through advanced research), immediately check the "auto-prioritize" box. That way, when folks get new jobs, they'll automatically prioritize the stuff that's in their wheelhouse. (This should be a default-on setting, I think--it's very rare you don't want them to prioritize the stuff that their job specializes in).
14

I found a menu to help with dupes eating lice meal or whatever before it was cooked into something not-useless - the Consumable tab. You can allow or forbid different foods, either by dupe or wholesale.

Fixed the waste of ingredients, it did. Colony number...four is going strong, at 49 cycles and counting. A couple idjits have died from refusing to do the last little bit so food could be provided, which is easily my biggest challenge so far. Terrariums provide oxygen, and a cistern will last long enough until I can get pumps and sieves up and running.

That's where I'm at now. I'll probably build another greenhouse and pull in a sixth dupe while researching my way up to renewable energy. After that will be experiments with hydrogen and chlorine, and all the other ways to create FUN! in a closed system. Outside of power generation, up to this point, everything else is pretty much renewable. Even power is, if you use enough mousewheels. I refuse to run the rat race, so coal mining and burning it is. Once I find oil, I might have to reevaluate.
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That's where I'm at now. I'll probably build another greenhouse and pull in a sixth dupe while researching my way up to renewable energy. After that will be experiments with hydrogen and chlorine, and all the other ways to create FUN! in a closed system. Outside of power generation, up to this point, everything else is pretty much renewable. Even power is, if you use enough mousewheels. I refuse to run the rat race, so coal mining and burning it is. Once I find oil, I might have to reevaluate.

Two power-management tips:
1) Don't give up on the rat race! Coal can be a real limiting factor if your coal plant runs constantly. I used the rat race until around cycle 60 or so.
2) Smart batteries are awesome: you can connect a smart battery directly to your coal plant using smart wire, and it'll automatically shut off the coal plant once the battery is full, restarting it when the battery is at 20% capacity (or whatever measure you set it at). Once I got this setup going, my coal-burning plummeted, and I now have about 30 tons of coal in storage, ready for what I anticipate to be major power usage in late game.
18

I think I finally figured out how the different tasks line up - had an issue with no one wanting to get rid of polluted water until I realized it was considered a "deliver" task. I'm about to chain my cook to the grill however - even with her priorities set to "cook and NOTHING ELSE", she wanders off everywhere. Three dupes almost died of starvation while she laid on the massage table for a couple days. I now have a second cook, to go along with two farmers, a miner, a gofer, and an engineer.

I've moved the generators to a "power room", with a bank of smart batteries next door. A pair of super-wire drops is in the plans along the central ladder. If all goes well, I'll be rearranging the entire base to take advantage of the central location.

Current concerns are water supply and heat. My lowest farm was over-temp, so it was moved upwards until I can get an HVAC system up and running. Even recycling polluted water, it looks like I'll run out, albeit in twenty cycles or so. When I find sleet wheat and can start on berry sludge, that will help as well.

Dupe management is generally beyond what I'm used to (Dwarf Fortress). There are much greater demands for each additional idiot dupe that you can't just brute force everything with 60 morons people.

I'm starting to plan how things should work, instead of constantly putting out little fires. This is the first time in this colony where I haven't had warnings or even cautions all over the place. However, I also realize that I'm still dancing a razor's edge - if I don't find more water in a timely manner, everything goes boom.
19

I'm having trouble with the metal refinery and the heavy powerplants and wires.

Even when I make sure to make it a priority and to supply materials, power and water, the metal refinery often goes unused. The 1200w requirement seems make it squirrely. I had to use heavy wire directly which is likely to result in waste.

I linked a coal plant to a battery then the battery to a transformer then from the transformer's output, I snaked conductive wires (2kW) and some of them broke, I'm not sure why. I would have thought the transformer was specifically to avoid that. Some of the wires that got damaged had nothing at the other end.
20

I'm starting to plan how things should work, instead of constantly putting out little fires. This is the first time in this colony where I haven't had warnings or even cautions all over the place. However, I also realize that I'm still dancing a razor's edge - if I don't find more water in a timely manner, everything goes boom.

Water is huge. The map I'm on right now I just hit cycle 150, and I can do big projects like take advantage of the natural gas geyser I just found--but only because I started with plentiful water.

Something that's super helpful is to find a swamp biome with a lot of pools of polluted water, and put a water pump in the lowest one and start pumping it into your cistern, where another water pump will send it through a cistern and into your main reservoir. When you've nearly drained that lowest swamp pool, dig a tunnel to the next highest swamp pool and start draining that water. Keep a switch on the water pump in the swamp, so it's only working when your overall water supply is low.

Using this method I have a massive swamp lake ready for use, a full cistern, and a full reservoir that feeds multiple farms and other equipment.

I'm also struggling with the metal refinery, though, trying to figure out how to keep it happy.
21

My current base is humming along relatively nicely, but I can't find oil, and I need that for the next set of stuff. Is it generally pretty far afield or did I get unlucky with my map?

Word of warning: be very careful with the heavy wires. They have a huge negative influence on decor. I started upgrading my grid and wondered why my dupes were totally stressed. Turns out that a line of heavy wires through a room is enough for around -400 decor; way too much to make up with decorations. If you must use heavy wires, put it in a shaft off to one side and run normal wiring through the rest of the base.
22

My current base is humming along relatively nicely, but I can't find oil, and I need that for the next set of stuff. Is it generally pretty far afield or did I get unlucky with my map?

Word of warning: be very careful with the heavy wires. They have a huge negative influence on decor. I started upgrading my grid and wondered why my dupes were totally stressed. Turns out that a line of heavy wires through a room is enough for around -400 decor; way too much to make up with decorations. If you must use heavy wires, put it in a shaft off to one side and run normal wiring through the rest of the base.

Yup--I've got my generators scattered around the periphery of the base (not on purpose, it's just as I expanded each new generator made sense to put in a new location I discovered), and heavy wire runs in crawlspaces or narrow shafters around the base.

One tip I saw was to use transformers regularly: a transformer off of heavy wire converts the current to a reasonable amount of current for a few rooms of the base, and you can run regular wire from the transformer into those rooms.
23

Water is huge. The map I'm on right now I just hit cycle 150, and I can do big projects like take advantage of the natural gas geyser I just found--but only because I started with plentiful water.

Something that's super helpful is to find a swamp biome with a lot of pools of polluted water, and put a water pump in the lowest one and start pumping it into your cistern, where another water pump will send it through a cistern and into your main reservoir. When you've nearly drained that lowest swamp pool, dig a tunnel to the next highest swamp pool and start draining that water. Keep a switch on the water pump in the swamp, so it's only working when your overall water supply is low.

Using this method I have a massive swamp lake ready for use, a full cistern, and a full reservoir that feeds multiple farms and other equipment.

I'm also struggling with the metal refinery, though, trying to figure out how to keep it happy.

My current game taught me the importance of airlocks and deodorizers. Managing air particles and gases is tricky. That's one of the reasons I've been shying away from using powerplants but I guess I'll have to.

Do I understand correctly that the reason you have transformers is to avoid having heavy wire in the equivalent of the "last mile"? Can you run several 1kW wires from the same transformer without problems?

I think the metal refinery might be a pretty advanced building and that the rock granulator is best for mid-game even if wastes 50% of the metal.

I have the choice of refining copper, iron or gold. Aside from max temp and decor, are there reasons to prefer one over the other?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr. Strangelove

Ok, this game is pretty cool. Glad I saw the thread.

My current base is humming along relatively nicely, but I can't find oil, and I need that for the next set of stuff. Is it generally pretty far afield or did I get unlucky with my map?

Word of warning: be very careful with the heavy wires. They have a huge negative influence on decor. I started upgrading my grid and wondered why my dupes were totally stressed. Turns out that a line of heavy wires through a room is enough for around -400 decor; way too much to make up with decorations. If you must use heavy wires, put it in a shaft off to one side and run normal wiring through the rest of the base.

My current game taught me the importance of airlocks and deodorizers. Managing air particles and gases is tricky. That's one of the reasons I've been shying away from using powerplants but I guess I'll have to.

Do I understand correctly that the reason you have transformers is to avoid having heavy wire in the equivalent of the "last mile"? Can you run several 1kW wires from the same transformer without problems?

Transformers definitely help with the "last wire" problem. A transformer's 1kW output can, I think, support a maximum of 1kW of machinery; send it out from that single outlet however you want.

Quote:

I think the metal refinery might be a pretty advanced building and that the rock granulator is best for mid-game even if wastes 50% of the metal.

I have the choice of refining copper, iron or gold. Aside from max temp and decor, are there reasons to prefer one over the other?

This is probably true. I have my hydrogen generator going, and it leaks polluted water everywhere. I'm wondering if setting up a refinery right next to it, in a pool of polluted water, would be a good idea--the water might help cool it down, and a water sieve can cool that water down when it gets too hot.

As for what to refine, I think that wire requires copper, but I'm not sure; when given the choice, I've been refining iron, since I've got so much of it.
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Has anyone worked with utility shafts? My latest colony collapsed because of the lazy cook, so I'm about to start a new one.

I tend to expand in large chunks rather than bit by bit. That way, when I find a layout that works well, I can just copy/paste it over and over to add population. Utility corridors seem like they would help in that regard.

Cool; thanks. I don't want to read too much on the wiki since I do like the exploration and discovery aspect. I'll dig deeper, though.

I did start a new base with Skywatcher's seed. One nice thing--a natural gas vent nearby. My older base had a steam vent nearby but I'm not sure I can build up steam infrastructure in time (it's at close to 100 cycles with plenty of food and stuff but I'm running low on some basic resources like coal and algae). Gas generators come earlier and should be a big help.
28

I had the brilliant idea of trapping shine bugs in my berry farming chamber. Free light! And it worked pretty well for a while. They do lay eggs and reproduce, but it seems that it's at just under the replacement rate. They were fed and happy, but eventually died off.

I was hoping to do the same thing with solar panels to have an almost completely renewable power source (just a tiny amount of minable food). But I need some way of creating a bunch of them. Even just laying two eggs per 25-cycle lifetime would be huge.
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Has anyone worked with utility shafts? My latest colony collapsed because of the lazy cook, so I'm about to start a new one.

I tend to expand in large chunks rather than bit by bit. That way, when I find a layout that works well, I can just copy/paste it over and over to add population. Utility corridors seem like they would help in that regard.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

What do you mean by "utility shafts"? Would these be columns of space containing pipes, wires, etc.? If so, I don't really use them--but my base is organize around a long ladder next to a fire pole.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr. Strangelove

One question--is there any way to encourage creatures to breed more?

I had the brilliant idea of trapping shine bugs in my berry farming chamber. Free light! And it worked pretty well for a while. They do lay eggs and reproduce, but it seems that it's at just under the replacement rate. They were fed and happy, but eventually died off.

I was hoping to do the same thing with solar panels to have an almost completely renewable power source (just a tiny amount of minable food). But I need some way of creating a bunch of them. Even just laying two eggs per 25-cycle lifetime would be huge.

I've got a hatch farm going--train a dupe to be a rancher, set up a grooming station, and I have a modest supply of meat and eggs. But shine bugs seem different; I can't wrangle them, and I can't tame them.
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What do you mean by "utility shafts"? Would these be columns of space containing pipes, wires, etc.? If so, I don't really use them--but my base is organize around a long ladder next to a fire pole.

Yep. I'm trying to get things like electricity/water/etc. out of the main quarters, to ease up on the decor hits. Plus, with thermal resistant blocks, I might be able to isolate the heat away to help in the mid-game.
31

Went back to see if I could salvage my second run--and it's still chugging along at cycle 135.

Searching for oil, I delved too greedily and too deep, and managed to give everyone a case of slimelung. Was looking pretty rough for a while but with vitamins everyone recovered.

Managed to build an atmo suit for further explorations. At this point, algae is the limiting factor, as I'm pretty much out. I've switched to algae distillers but they need slime to function, and collecting slime without a suit will just make everyone sick again.

I might switch to electrolyzers for the oxygen instead if I can't sustain the slime collection--we'll see.
32

I'm having some difficulty using automation. I put a pressure plate in front of (say) the grill, use wires from the plate to the grill and the power auto-shutoff, make sure that the pressure plate will turn on if 29kg+ (the Dupes weigh 30kg) get on the plate and they won't walk to the plate even when given the right job and high priority.

I did find the pressure plates useful to turn on/off the power by myself; You don't need a Dupe to change setting so you can put 1000kg as the quantity and change whether the trigger is being above or below 1000kg which turns off the machine at will. It's a cheap workaround to knowing how to use the mechanics properly, though.

they won't walk to the plate even when given the right job and high priority.

Hmm. Presumably, the dupes aren't seeing the station as a viable destination when it's unpowered. I haven't used the automation much but I have used the door access modes, and you can see that they won't bother traveling to the door if they can't open it. Probably the same thing is going on here.
35

Hmm. Presumably, the dupes aren't seeing the station as a viable destination when it's unpowered. I haven't used the automation much but I have used the door access modes, and you can see that they won't bother traveling to the door if they can't open it. Probably the same thing is going on here.

With that note, make sure to take care of any automation wires near doors. If the wire sends an "OFF" signal, it'll lock the door.
36

Went back to see if I could salvage my second run--and it's still chugging along at cycle 135.

Searching for oil, I delved too greedily and too deep, and managed to give everyone a case of slimelung. Was looking pretty rough for a while but with vitamins everyone recovered.

Managed to build an atmo suit for further explorations. At this point, algae is the limiting factor, as I'm pretty much out. I've switched to algae distillers but they need slime to function, and collecting slime without a suit will just make everyone sick again.

I might switch to electrolyzers for the oxygen instead if I can't sustain the slime collection--we'll see.

From what I understand algae distillers have a pitiful ROI if it's even positive. I've been told to think about them less as an algae producer and more as slime (and slimelung) disposal.

Also, I hate you all for getting me interested in this game, and I hate Klei for what they've built. It's not a game, it's turtles all the way down. "Yay, finally got my food production out of the gutter ! Crap, now all my water's turning to piss. OK, this setup should cycle nicely... dammit, brownouts. OK, fossil fuels are limited but this will hold for a while and the CO2 buildup seems to... wait why are all my plants dying ? Why is my entire base 40 degrees and climbing ?! Wait, the processed poop is not only 70 fucking degrees, it's also still laced with poop germs ? EVERYBODY STOP FERTILIZING RIGHT NOW ! The poop is a trap ! AAAH !"

Also, fluid mechanics are weird in this game. I wanted to make a neat plumbing setup that would have used a deep pump to supply only what the space toilet needs and flow the rest into a big reservoir for later use, with valves and everything, but apparently you're not supposed to make T junctions because that fucks everything up. Instead of flowing equally in either tube, or (what I wanted to do) to have the excess flow caused by a valve on one arm of the T go the other way, the water flows fully one way for one "tick", then fully the other for the next. Had to instead set up a second pump in my big reservoir and essentially design a separate plumbing network just for the space loo. It works, but it's inefficient power-wise.

I also got the weird problem that my little janitors are not picking up dirt. I've setup a dump room with tons of chests for all the materials, and ordering people to sweep shit up before mining new stuff works for everything else, but they won't pick dirt up even though there are empty chests with "dirt" as their only allowed stuff.

Pro-tip though : the gate by which the dupes get in is a free, heat-less light source, good for early berry farming.

Still not sure how to deal with heat creep though. Even thick, insulated walls around the major offenders (and those hot exterior biomes) that only slows the problem down but it all heats up eventually and cooling systems require more power so more heat... Entropy's a right bastard.
37

__________________--- ---
Assume I'm right and you're wrong - we'll both save a lot of time.

Still not sure how to deal with heat creep though. Even thick, insulated walls around the major offenders (and those hot exterior biomes) that only slows the problem down but it all heats up eventually and cooling systems require more power so more heat... Entropy's a right bastard.

My base is going quite well--I had a steam vent nearby which I was able to tap into, and which gives me unlimited water. Nice!

I had it pump into my main cistern, but that had the side effect of making it rather warm--and my nearby crops were starting to die. What to do?

Well, there was an ice cave nearby. So I built a heat exchanger--I pumped the warm water through insulated pipes to the cavern, then through radiant pipes, and then back through insulated pipes and back into the cistern. It's slow, but it's gradually reducing my head load. I'll probably automate it next.

Only problem is the radiant pipes need a lot of iron. But it's working well so far with just a short segment.
38

I don't know if I'm playing like most other people. Around Cycle 80, I have 5 Dupes, my tech tree is nearly complete and haven't dug much beyond the initial temperate zone. I don't have any problems with heat.

I'm trying to get the Dupes to trying to get some Dupes to wear atmo suits while digging a long and narrow shaft down the swamp and into the frozen and oil biomes.

A thing I found is that air pumps don't seem to require being on the ground. Intuitively I always put them there but they don't seem to require that which would increase opportunities.
40

In the seed provided above, I had a nice, large base around Cycle 40 with (IIRC) 7 Dupes clustered around the initial zone but the map was from several versions ago. I started a new game on the same seed and lost my old base. The files might still be in my computer with the newer saves using the same seed blocking 'em.

A thing I found is that air pumps don't seem to require being on the ground. Intuitively I always put them there but they don't seem to require that which would increase opportunities.

Yup. This is useful for the lighter gases; hydrogen in particular. I have a room with some electrolyzers and a hydrogen generator. There's an air pump at the top that feeds to a gas filter, sending the hydrogen to a generator and the oxygen to elsewhere in the base. The hydrogen mostly floats upward so the pump can get at it. I could do the same with various hydrogen reservoirs but that's a finite resource. The generator doesn't fully pay for the electrical cost of the electrolyzers, but it helps.

I'm at close to cycle 200 with 10 dupes. Algae is pretty much used up at this point so oxygen generation needs to come from somewhere else. Heat is really my biggest problem but I think I have a solution with my heat exchanger approach. It's slowly but gradually cooling things off. And I just finished digging an oil well; now to hook up a processing unit and burn the natural gas for more energy.
43

Atmosuits: I put an atmosuit checkpoint linked up to atmosuit docks, hooked them up with power and a gas pump + oxygen filter, assigned the atmosuits to the Dupes I want to wear them. I assign a high priority to the atmosuit docks. Sometimes they wear them and sometimes not, I can't pin down why. The atmosuits are currently sitting right in front of the atmosuit docks with the docks asking for delivery and the Dupes aren't wearing them or putting them back into the docks. Suggestions on possible problem source/solution?
44

Hmm. They've always been totally reliable for me. I haven't mucked with priorities or made any assignments.

It is always the assigned dupes that make it through without suits, or is it the unassigned ones? If it's the latter, you could put a door in front of the passage that allows only the assigned dupes to pass. If the former--not sure, but do you just have a single exit point and no way to bypass it?
45

This game benefits very much from screenshots both to understand what others are saying and to just enjoy seeing the creativity and problem solving/creation of other people: https://imgur.com/a/YMGMOXN I'm curious to see everyone else's.

In the second picture, the problem is that the Dupes just don't make it past the checkpoint when it's on, even if there's a suit in the dock right next to it. For example, if I told any of them to talk to the ore scrubber or go into the slime polluted water reservoir, they wouldn't do it.

If no atmosuits are assigned, will Dupes just take one if they have to make it past the checkpoint?
46

Dupes will just take an atmosuit if there's one free, regardless of assignment. And in my experience, they won't go past the checkpoint if there are no free ones.

It looks to me like your problem is that the suit racks don't actually have suits in them. They should be hanging where the green outline is, not laying on the floor in front. Somehow they didn't get delivered properly. Maybe manually sweep the suits and try the delivery again?
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I'll try that tomorrow. In the past, they would just pick them up but I'll try not assigning them and sweeping them. Thanks. I must have made things more complex than they needed to be, which is a potential pitfall with this game.

Well, it seemed like it was time for a culling. Whether I royally screwed up the priorities, or these guys are as dumb as they seem, 5 of my 8 dupes starved to death. In their defense, half of my population had slimelung from my headlong charge to a frozen biome, but I feel there is no excuse for letting fields of grain sit idle while everyone dies.

In good news, the power room is completed, and the metal refinery is up and running, with it's own pool of coolant. I decided to do some math, and it looks like polluted water is the way to go - it has both a higher boiling point and heat capacity. Also, water sieves output clean water at 40 degrees, so it might work best to pipe a refinery in between a cistern pump and the sieves, with a valve to bypass if it's full. That would confine most of your heat buildup to your sieves, where you can treat it with your cooling method of choice.
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Last edited by Chisquirrel; 06-28-2018 at 04:28 AM.
Reason: missed a nut

I don't know if I'm playing like most other people. Around Cycle 80, I have 5 Dupes, my tech tree is nearly complete and haven't dug much beyond the initial temperate zone. I don't have any problems with heat.

Heat problems start to rear their ugly heads two ways. One is breaching into the volcanic biomes (the ones near the starting area that are ~70°c ; and the one deeper down where oil and stuff is found and is basically at boiling temp), the other is moving beyond the "hamster wheel" stage of power generation and running heavy equipment around the clock.
The first is a problem because your guys will bring back the hot rocks and metal into your storage or just build stuff with it, where they'll passively radiate for a good long while if you don't Take Steps (like setting up a submerged storage to let them cool down before doing stuff with it) ; the second, well, machines tend to run hot. Not necessarily "deadly heat and boiling the atmo" hot, but even just the coal burner radiates 40°c which is deadly to the plants of the starting zone. Batteries run quite hot too. The algae oxy generators emit oxygen that ever so slowly fill the whole atmo at 30°c, which is exactly the upper limit mealworm and berries can survive, 1° more (e.g. from the lamp illuminating the berries) and they immediately keel over ! Electrolysis is even worse, oxy comes out of the machine at 40° or more depending on the conditions of the room it's in... it all adds up over time.
You can delay all that with insulation tiles or liquid cooling but unless you have some way to bleed temperature out somehow, your whole base will heat up juuust a little bit every cycle.
And the problem with heat is that it's easy to gain it, but it's difficult to remove and every cooling method is all the slower that you have a large volume to cool down - i.e. your entire base's atmo. Which is a problem when the first warning sign that your base has a heating issue is that your food production dies all at once https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb...es/biggrin.gif. You need to take care of or at least keep an eye out for the issue from very early on.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chisquirrel

Also, water sieves output clean water at 40 degrees, so it might work best to pipe a refinery in between a cistern pump and the sieves, with a valve to bypass if it's full. That would confine most of your heat buildup to your sieves, where you can treat it with your cooling method of choice.

Kinda, the sieves also output polluted dirt, which you can compost but that's 70°C.
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